We are, therefore, dealing with two very different types of distribution. When distribution is usually discussed, it means the distribution of products, arising from a given mode of production. It is the mode of production that determines the form and content of the distribution. Moreover, the nature of this distribution itself ensures the continual reproduction of the given mode of production. Again, that is why the ideas of the vulgar socialists are idealist, subjectivist and utopian, and consequently reactionary.
It is not possible for workers to obtain “the full fruits of their labour”, for the reasons Marx sets out in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Setting aside the need to cover accumulation, provision for unproductive workers, social funds and so on, under capitalism, it would mean the disappearance of profit, and so, also, of interest and rent. If profit was even significantly reduced, capital accumulation would slow, or cease, because there would be less profit to finance it, after capitalists had covered their own consumption. So, the demand for labour would fall, relative to supply, causing wages to fall.
And, it does not matter whether this fall in profit comes from a rise in money wages or from a rise in the social wage, i.e. the state taxing profits, used to pay benefits or directly distribute products to workers, in the form of various goods and services. The result is the same. At the same time, a fall in profit, so that any capital accumulation must be financed by borrowing, means higher interest rates, which leaves even less profit of enterprise to fund accumulation. A lower average industrial rate of profit, means relatively larger surplus profits in primary production, and so higher rents, again distracting from profits and capital accumulation.
And, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 15, it is precisely where wages rise so as to squeeze profits that a crisis of overproduction of capital arises, i.e. capital expands relative to the social working day, to an extent that absolute surplus value stops rising, and relative surplus value begins to fall. The response of capital, automatically to such conditions, which arose, for example, in the 1970's, is to switch from extensive capital accumulation, to intensive capital accumulation. In other words, rather than seeking to expand output, it seeks to produce the existing levels of output much more efficiently, i.e. to bring about a revolution in productivity. The consequence is a technological revolution that introduces whole new ranges of labour-saving machines, so that a relative surplus population is created, and wages fall, and profits rise, as witnessed in the 1980's, and after.
“To examine production divorced from this distribution which is a constituent part of it, is obviously idle abstraction; whereas conversely the distribution of products is automatically determined by that distribution which is initially a factor of production. Ricardo, the economist of production par excellence, whose object was the understanding of the distinct social structure of modern production, for this very reason declares that distribution, not production, is the proper subject of contemporary political economy. This is a witness to the banality of those economists who proclaim production as an eternal truth, and confine history to the domain of distribution.” (p 202)
Social revolutions occur, because material conditions change, as a consequence of am evolution of the productive forces. That is the foundation of Marx and Engels' theory of historical materialism, whose driving force is The Law of Value, which has the same role, within it, as The Law of Natural Selection in Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Man did not decide, one day, to simply organise production on the basis of slavery. Indeed, as Marx and Engels describe, in Anti-Duhring, it was impossible to do so. To have slavery it is necessary that social productivity rises sufficiently that one person can provide more in a day than is required for their own reproduction.
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